Thirteen minutes to midnight here in the former Leningrad.

It’s an oddly familiar place, actually.  Lots of imperious public buildings, national galleries devoted to the arts, and large green squares devoted to dead warriors.  Took a while, but then it was obvious: it’s a lot like Washington, D.C. 

With one large exception.  Shortly before midnight as I write this, it’s still bright enough outside to read a book, assuming you have decent eyesight and at least a 12-point font.

They call the evening here during this time of year "White Nights," and with good reason.  It never actually gets fully dark.  The sun goes down, but just in a peek-a-boo way, hiding just below the horizon for a few hours before popping back up a bit after 3 am or so.

The big activity here in all the extra daylight seems to be dressing up in a boxy sport jacket (for men) or a too-tight outfit possibly intended for a pygmy chimpanzee but certainly not a full-grown human female (for women), smoking many cigarettes while looking bored, and then wandering down to the Neva at about 1:30 am to watch the drawbridges being raised one after another.

You get the feeling the acting-bored part isn’t exactly a pose.

Although everything I just said is completely unfair to a city which has managed for many generations and under some of the worst conditions imaginable to remain an important center for the fine arts: within a ten-minute walk of this here coffee house, you can find important landmarks in literature, music, theater, dance, and the wearing of large Italian sunglasses while scowling bitterly.

This last art may not be fully appreciated yet in the rest of the world, but the folks walking around Nevsky Prospekt are clearly committed to pioneering and popularizing the form.  You get the feeling that people from the suburbs may even be taking night classes.

You don’t really notice your body clock being affected by all the extra light.  Not at first.  Then one day you’re walking along at about three in the afternoon and you notice that all the stores have closed, nightclubs are spewing pulsating music, it’s almost sunrise the next day, and that you’ve got about as much time sense as your average UFO abductee.

Which is why I’m sitting in a coffee shop at six minutes after midnight, feeling perfectly alert despite having walked enough miles to personally re-enact Napoleon’s retreat to Paris.  And in a little while I’m planning to saunter down to the Neva, slap on a pair of designer shades, and give total strangers a withering look of disdain.  If someone even tries to talk with me, I’ll be entirely too important to even notice.

Which is another way this place feels like a lot like Washington.

Because that’s how long this one was up… my bad.  Busy with life.  Book deal.  Traveling.  Etc.

If the damn media still worked, which insider would have already Deep Throated the Bush White House?
National Security Advisor Richard Clarke
712   36.7%
Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill
156   8%
Ambassador Joe Wilson
114   5.9%
Mining engineer Jack Spedaro
110   5.7%
U.S. Army General Eric Shinseki
108   5.6%
USAF Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski
107   5.5%
Army Spc. Joseph Darby
106   5.5%
FBI Chief Division Counsel Coleen Rowley
106   5.5%
FBI translator Sibel Edmonds
106   5.5%
CIA Bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer
105   5.4%
Medicare actuary Richard Foster
105   5.4%
Secretary of the Army Thomas White
105   5.4%

If you’re curious who these people are, those names are all active links, incidentally.  Although now we learn that Karl Rove himself may be the guy who manages to undo this White House.  If only.

New poll at upper left.

Holy crap, I’m actually in St. Petersburg.  It’s all Russian and stuff.

Spent the morning walking the banks of the Neva and blowing my mind at the Church Of Our Savior On Spilled Blood, which is less a house of worship than a ten-story walk-in mosaic artwork designed as if Willie Wonka had just gotten an everlasting gobstopper from the Virgin Mary.

Up there with the Hagia Sophia for supercool ex-cathedrals.

Limited time as always on this trip, unfortunately.  Will have to do massive catchup later if possible.  But this is my impression so far of the new Russia:

I am certain my room is bugged.  But only to see if I’m using the minibar.

Ever been out running around late with friends, maybe during your college years, and you realize you’re not quite sure where you are, and so you dive into a brightly-lit convenience store for a few minutes, just to get your bearings?

Apparently this happens to tiny deer as well.  Footage even made the news here (although I had to crib this from an American web page).

Cute is apparently an international language…

Online access remains limited.  Saw this, however, in the international print edition of the USA Today, elaborating precisely the problem with the entire American political system (to wit: that its financing system remains corrupt to the core, and virtually every aspect of public policy is now on sale to the highest bidder):

The best-case annual return on invested capital within a particularly robust business: maybe forty percent.

The best-case annual return on invested capital when buying political influence: maybe a thousand percent.

You can see where the whole American system might be headed long-term very quickly.

On a related note:

One of the arguments you hear against sending aid to the poorest African nations is that many of their governments are notoriously corrupt kleptocracies.

The near-immediate response which seems to be commonly made by supporters of such aid across Europe: the American government’s a kleptocracy, too, but that doesn’t stop us dealing with them.

Whether that’s a fair comment or not you can judge for yourself.  But I’ve now heard it made twice, in two different countries.  And neither interviewer flinched.